Varroa mites--considered the No. 1 enemy of beekeepers--will be among the topics discussed when Gene Brandi of Los Banos, Calif., president of the American Beekeeping Federation, speaks at the 40th annual conference of the Western Apicultural Society, to be held Sept. 5-8 at the University of California, Davis.

Brandi will deliver his presentation on "Beekeeping in California: An Overview of Colony Management," covering the seasonal management of bees and their population cycle, at 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, Sept. 5 in the Activities and Recreation Center (ARC). He will discuss both managed and non-managed colonies.

Brandi, involved in bee industry activities over the past 40 years, chaired the National Honey Board for three years, and served 37 years on the California State Beekeepers' Association Board of Directors, including a year as president in 2016-17. He and his son currently manage about 2000 colonies in Central California.

Brandi, who holds a bachelor of science degree in ag business from California Polytechnic Institute, San Luis Obispo, in 1974, is heavily involved with bees. Among his many activities, he chaired the California Apiary Board from 1992 to 1995; served on the Project Apis m board from 2006 to 2016, and has been a member of the California Almond Board Bee Task Force since 2004 and a member of Carl Hayden Bee Research Center's Industry Liaison Committee since 2002. The USDA research center is located in Tucson.

The Western Apicultural Society (WAS) conference will filled with educational topics, networking, field trips, a silent auction, door prizes and just plain "bee" fun, says honey bee guru and WAS co-founder Eric Mussen, Extension apiculturist emeritus, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who is serving his sixth term as president.

WAS, founded at UC Davis, is a non-profit organization that represents mainly small-scale beekeepers in the western portion of North America, from Alaska and the Yukon to California and Arizona. Beekeepers across North America will gather to hear the latest in science and technology pertaining to their industry and how to keep their bees healthy.

Eric Mussen of UC Davis, who is serving his sixth term as president of the Western Apicultural Society (WAS), says those registering early will save $50. “There will still be an opportunity to register after July 31 but you won't get the ‘early bee' special,” he said.

The early registration fee for the full conference is $175, while the cost after July 31 is $225. One-day registration is also offered at $60. The conference is open to all interested persons.

WAS, a non-profit organization, represents mainly small-scale beekeepers in the western portion of North America, from Alaska and the Yukon to California and Arizona. Beekeepers across North America will gather to hear the latest in science and technology pertaining to their industry and how to keep their bees healthy.

Most events, Mussen said, will take place at the UC Davis Activities and Recreation Center (ARC) and surrounding facilities associated with the Department of Entomology and Nematology. Off-site tours are also planned during the afternoons. Mussen retired as California's Extension apiculturist in 2014, but, as emeritus, continues to maintains his office at Briggs Hall, UC Davis.

The conference kicks off with the three co-founders engaging in nostalgia. The three, all from the UC Davis, are apiculturist Norm Gary, WAS first president and now professor emeritus; Mussen, first vice president; and Becky Westerdahl, first secretary-treasurer and now an Extension nematologist in the Department of Entomology and Nematology. Mussen said many former WAS officers and founding members are expected to attend and participate in the lively session.

At the conference, Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine, will share his insights on the "The Rapidly Changing Bee Scene"; Les Crowder will discuss managing honey bees in top bar hives, and Larry Connor will cover "Keeping Your Bees Alive and Growing.” Several speakers will present mini-sessions outdoors at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility and the adjacent Häagen Dazs Bee Haven, a bee friendly garden operated by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. Both are on Bee Biology Road.

"The beekeeping and honey industries are, and have been extremely volatile,” said Flottum, editor of Bee Culture for more than 30 years. “That's what happens when you have animals, the weather, government and humans in the mix.” He will discuss “what's going on at the moment that beekeepers should be aware of, and more importantly, what to expect in the near and not so near future that will affect bees, beekeepers and honey, queen and honey bee production."

Flottum also authored three books on beginning, intermediate and advanced beekeeping and one on honey plants and honey tasting, and is working on several more books. He is the editor of BEEkeeping, Your First Three Years since its inception two years ago. He keeps about a dozen colonies at his home in Northeast Ohio, where he lives with his wife, chickens and of course, the bees.

"Kim Flottum has been a stalwart in U.S. beekeeping for decades,” Mussen said. “He ferrets out information on national, regional, and local beekeeping happenings and disseminates the news in various places, depending upon his role at the time.”

Other presenters will include beekeeper Serge Labesque of Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, who advocates selecting local bee stocks that can handle the problems of current-day beekeeping. Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center will lead a formal honey tasting, and Sarah Red-Laird of Oregon, executive director of Bee Girl and the American Beekeeping Federation's Kids and Bees Program director, will present a breakout session on “Beekeeping Education/Honey Bee Conservation."

UC Davis artist Steve Dana created a T-shirt for the conference featuring a bee on a high wheeler bicycle or penny-farthing, symbolizing UC Davis. The t-shirt can be ordered on the WAS website at http://www.westernapiculturalsociety.org. The conference registration form, speaker program and other information are online.

“Nematodes” and “commencement” don't usually appear together in the same sentence.

But they did when UC Davis student Hannah Trumbull, a human development major and political science minor from Albany, Calif., delivered her address at the recent UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences commencement.

What's a nematode, you ask?

Short answer: worms. Longer answer? “Nematodes are an amazing phylum of organisms—they exist in almost every known environment on the plant, and different species eat everything from bacteria and fungi to plant and animal tissue,” says UC Davis nematologist/parasitologist Lauren Camp, received her doctorate from UC Davis last December.

What Trumbull had to say about worms, aka flatworms, at her commencement address stirred the crowd.

“Out of all the lessons I learned at Davis, the one I am thinking about today, that I come back to again and again, is that the best I can hope for in my life is to uphold the standard of a healthy flatworm,” Trumbull told her audience.

“I took a human development course on longevity with Professor Carey last winter and one day he lectured about how to characterize nematode health as an example of lifespan measures.”

"Here are the four stages of nematode health, in order from most to least healthy, and I hope you'll see why this struck me as profound.

A Class A nematode is in constant motion.

A Class B nematode only moves when prodded.

A Class C nematode does not move even when prodded.

A Class D nematode is a dead nematode.

"To reiterate: Constant motion, moving when prodded, not moving when prodded, death. In essence, all possible human responses to life can be boiled down to categorize us as degrees of healthy nematodes.

"For a nematode, a prod is a physical object poking it in its petri dish and motion is a squirm. For humans, a prod can be a personal or national event, a medical problem, a break-up, loss of a job or a sudden epiphany that life should be different. Motion is creation, connection, empathizing and self-actualizing through moves as small as planting seeds, or as large as supporting a loved one through finishing a college degree. But what sets us in motion, and what determines whether we move to action when prodded?

"Walking out of Haring Hall after Professor Carey's lecture, I stopped and bought a square of baklava from the Afghan Student Association bake sale and got handed about seventeen half-sheet flyers encouraging me to rush a service sorority, come to a disco dance-a-thon, volunteer at a honey bee festival and learn how to make my own shoes. I smiled at the man in all white who preaches on the quad with his dog and the guy who wears a kilt and plays celtic flute music. Young people threw frisbees, climbed trees, and played guitar, and I knew that if I went up to any of them I would be welcome to join in. This university is a massive petri dish with as many opportunities for motion as you have hours in your day. The difference between a Class B and a Class C nematode is whether we choose to respond.

"We are Class A nematodes when we move every time we are able and every time it is right. Constant motion is a requisite of collective responsibility. When one person experiences injustice, who is obligated to move with them? One of my biggest passions in college has been communal living. At the Multifaith Living Community, I compared my own European Jewish recipe for hummus with my Arab Muslim housemates in an argument that ended with the agreement that Whole Foods spinach hummus was an affront to everyone in the room.

"When a swastika was spray-painted near campus that year, those same community members were at my door with flowers and hugs checking in on me and asking how they could help. When the Davis mosque was attacked in a hate crime this year, I was immediately at their doors with all the support I could give. Communities set us into motion by propelling us outside of our own petri dishes and respond to the ways that other people are prodded. As a textbook Class A nematode once told me: 'the name of the game is do your best every single time and never stop.' The hard part, and the empowering part, is that from here on out the rules of the game are open to interpretation.

"Nematodes do not undergo somatic cell division, so they only ever have 159 cells. In contrast, millions of the cells in your body have divided, died, and been replaced since we entered this room today. How lucky are we to have the chance to recreate ourselves, in these constantly moving bodies? Entering this new stage of our lives, we must be cognizant of the threat of stillness. It is easy to become jaded and apathetic Class C nematodes who do not even move when prodded. Say yes to constant motion, take the hand of the opportunities for creation around you and in your future. College has taught me that hard work pays off, as does intelligence, but most of all it pays off to keep moving. To do your best every time. As we move into the next stage of our lives, I encourage each of you to take what you have learned in the course of your journey, and find how it can motivate necessary motion, widely, constantly and to the best of your ability. Thank you."

At UC Davis, Trumbull served as a board member of Challah for Hunger, program leader at the Multifaith Living Community, program staff at YMCA Youth and Government, and a recreation leader for the City of Davis. She lived at the Turtle House, a cooperative living house where she published magazines of student art and operated a “Taco Trike” that raised money for Planned Parenthood.

Career plans? Trumbull draws inspiration from her mother, a kindergarten teacher, to go into public education policy, and her father, a general contractor and small business owner, "to try to one day build an intentional living community." Next step: working at the Bay Area nonprofit Rising Sun.

The 10th annual National Pollinator Week ends Sunday, June 25, and what an opportunity it's been to showcase our pollinators!

As noted entomologist May Berenbaum pointed out, it's "a celebration of Earth's 100,000-plus animal species that, by transporting pollen and facilitating flower fertilization, make life possible for two-thirds of the world's flowering plants."

Berenbaum wrote an excellent pollinator piece posted yesterday on the National Academy of Sciences' Facebook page. It bears repeating.

Berenbaum, professor and head of the Department of Entomology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a past president of the Entomological Society of America, related: "Not entirely coincidentally, 2017 is an anniversary for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—it's the tenth year since the publication of the Committee on the Status of Pollinators in North America report, a committee I chaired."

"My association with pollinator issues goes back to 2004, when, as Chair of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources, I was an outspoken advocate for a study to determine whether North America's pollinator species were declining, as appeared to be happening elsewhere in the world. The committee released its findings in October 2006, among the most striking of which was a decline in the numbers of commercial honey bees such that, were the trend to continue, the U.S. apiculture industry, on which producers of over 90 crops depend, 'would vanish by 2035.' In a remarkable confluence of events, that same month, the first reports of what was later dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) surfaced; bees literally began vanishing, abandoning depleted, doomed colonies. Concern in the agricultural community and then the general public escalated and has remained high ever since. So, sadly, have losses; although CCD itself has declined, in the past year America lost one-third of its commercial colonies."

The honey bee genome sequencing project, headed by NAS member Gene Robinson, was completed in October 2006, the same month the committee released its findings. Wrote Berenbaum: "The genome provided brand-new insights into potential vulnerabilities of honey bees—a paucity of genes relating to immunity and detoxification, possibly rendering them particularly susceptible to parasites, pathogens, and pesticides. Fortunately, the genome also provided powerful tools for studying honey bees and their relatives. In September 2007, the first 'genome-enabled'' study was published, identifying a honey bee virus new to the USA; since then, hundreds of genome-enabled studies have expanded knowledge of basic honey bee biology and introduced methods for monitoring and improving honey bee health. How honey bees cope with pesticides has been a focus of my own research for a decade, a pursuit that wouldn't have been feasible without genomic tools."

"The 2007 report also concluded that, unlike honey bees, population data for thousands of America's native pollinators (including its 4,000 native bee species) were sorely lacking and called for increasing efforts to engage the public in documenting, mitigating, and reversing declines," Berenbaum noted. "Since then, many data gaps have been filled and conservation strategies implemented. In 2014, President Obama prioritized a national strategy to promote pollinator health, including public-private partnerships to restore pollinator habitat."

This year the rusty-patched bumblebee "became the first continental bee to be protected under the Endangered Species Act," Berenbaum wrote.

Let's hope there will be many others.

Background on the rusty-patched bumble bee: Among those credited with sounding the alarm was Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis. It was a long, dedicated and challenging effort by many people who care. In 2010 Thorp co-authored a petition sent to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. The petition was submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013. In 2015, agency officials agreed to consider it. In 2016, they proposed protection. Then on Jan. 10, 2017, the agency listed the rusty-patched bumble bee as an endangered species.

Other key players in making this all happen included natural history photographer/filmmakerClay Boltand his friends at the Day's Edge Productions, which created the award-winning film,A Ghost in the Making: Searching for the Rusty Patched Bumble Beewith support from the Xerces Society and others. The result: nearly 200,000 persons signed a petition seeking endangered status for the bee.

Thorp, co-author of Bumble Bees of North America, An Identification Guide. continues to sound the alarm on the declining bumble bee population, especially Franklin's bumble bee (Bombus franklini), found only in a five-county area of northern California and southern Oregon.

He's been monitoring the elusive bee since 1998, but sadly, hasn't seen it since Aug. 9, 2006 when he spotted it in a meadow near Mt. Ashland. (See Bug Squad)

Thorp helped place Franklin's bumble bee on theRed List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). "Bombus franklinioccurs only in the USA," IUCN relates. "It is found only from southern Oregon to northern California between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade Ranges, in Douglas, Jackson and Josephine and Siskiyou and Trinity counties in Oregon and California, respectively. This area is around 190 miles in the north-south direction (40º58' to 43º30'N latitude) and 70 miles from east to west (122º to 124ºW longitude)."

Franklin's bumble bee is named in 1921 for Henry J. Franklin, who monographed the bumble bees of North and South America in 1912-13. During its flight season, from mid-May through September, Franklin's bumble bee frequents California poppies, lupines, vetch, wild roses, blackberries, clover, sweet pea, horsemint and mountain penny royal. It collects pollen primarily from lupines and poppies, and gathers nectar mainly from mints.

As the end of the 10th annual National Pollination Week nears, there is so much more to be done to understand, protect and celebrate our pollinators to ensure that they don't "end."

As May Berenbaum said: "A week hardly seems long enough for the celebration!"

The flower, in the family Phrymacease, is a native shrub common in chaparral and coastal scrub habitats of California and Oregon. It is primarily pollinated by Anna's hummingbird. Other common pollinators include bumble bees, carpenter bees, and thrips.

Dispersal is considered a key driver of beta diversity, which is “the variation in species composition among local communities,” Vannette said.

They are the first to publish work showing that increased dispersal can increase biodiversity.

In their experiment, they reduced natural rates of dispersal by eliminating multiple modes of microbial dispersal. “Specifically we focused in nectar-inhabiting bacteria and yeasts that are dispersed among flowers by wind, insects and birds,” they said. “We imposed dispersal limitation on individual flowers and quantified microbial abundance, species composition and microbial effects on nectar chemistry.”

This work has direct implications for conservation of many organisms in addition to bacteria and yeast, suggesting that preserving routes of dispersal among habitat patches may be important in the maintenance of biodiversity. In contrast to previous work showing that dispersal can homogenize communities or make them more similar, the published work demonstrates that dispersal can in some cases generate communities that are more different from each other. The authors hypothesize that this could be driven by priority effects, where early arriving species change the species that can establish within that habitat.

Why focus on nectar-inhabiting microbes? Previous work by Vannette and others shows that microbial activity in nectar can alter nectar chemistry and influence plant-pollinator interactions by altering nectar chemistry. In the Ecology Letters study, microbes were also found to change nectar chemistry, explaining ~50% of the variation in sugar composition in the field. This suggests that nectar-inhabiting bacteria and yeast can influence the nectar rewards available to pollinators in a natural setting.

More broadly, “Studying the role of microbes in the environment addresses one of the biggest mysteries in science,” Vannette says. In her current work, she and her lab are investigating how microbial communities form, change, and function in their interactions with insects and plants. They are also researching how microorganisms affect plant defense against herbivores and plant attraction to pollinators.

Vannette, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology faculty as an assistant professor in 2015.

Vannette's research was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through the Life Sciences Research Fellowship. Stanford also funded the research through grants from the National Science Foundation, the Terman Fellowship, and the Department of Biology at Stanford University.